A4C Chess Group News

News Flash

This article was added on February 06.08. One of the key features of the online turn based association is to provide a players registry. The purpose of this registry is to allow players who enjoy this type of chess to be allowed to register there favorite nickname or handle rather than the more formal format (real name) that is requested on correspondence chess site or chess sites that consider themselves to be correspondence chess site.

The internet has its own rules and customs and in the early days (people involved in chess) were (are) considered the pioneers in the creation of online chess (ICC, FICS) and online turn based chess (Beholder Chess, Webchess, compwebchess and A4C). Our goals were to promote chess, some of the promoters took the road of pay chess while others took a more pure road (for lack of a better word) free chess.

In my opinion until recently, no online turn based chess site could truly call itself a correspondence chess site, these sites could not honestly say that they followed correspondence chess rules; some of them didn’t even know what those rules looked like and or had no understanding of those rules. At best, they could only call themselves correspondence (like) or similar to correspondence chess sites. A few sites started using the term (loosely) turn based chess, which in my opinion is the most accurate description to this type of chess.

Trying to build an association around a turn based chess system has been difficult; players (persons) always attack what they don’t understand. Some don’t believe that there is a need for another type of chess, but if you accept that view point how do you give credit to the pioneers of this type of chess, players who use the internet, ask yourself this question, when the internet started and we started playing chess, where was FIDE? Where was your local chess association, USCF, CFC or any correspondence organization etc? Those organizations where not present on the internet and had no interest in this type of chess. Now that the internet is a lot more popular some of these organization feel they can join the web (they are welcome) however, dictating terms to or trying to represent that they are the governing body when it comes to online turn based chess is ridiculous. You can not just sweep the pioneers of this type of chess under the rug; this type of chess deserves to be recognized as a chess entity onto itself. This is one of the main reasons this association was formed and I encourage the players and webmasters who pioneered this type of chess, to support the ideas or concepts of this type of new chess.

Added by admin October 29, 2007 (10:45AM)